Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Now I have two kids. So far, it's pretty similar to just having one kid. The time and energy needed to sustain double the lifeforms can be obtained almost entirely from further lowering of parenting standards. There are a lot of good jokes about this. You can see from this blog how it goes. Max got a post at one month announcing his existence and another at four months about parenting surprises. Clark? He's eight months now, and this is all he gets.

Anyway, behold how cute he is:

So far, baby Clark looks basically the same as baby Max did, except for a little more hair, to the point where sometimes we can't tell which is which in a photo:

But they're not quite identical. Here are Max and Clark at around six months:

Clark has been more chill the whole time. Sleeps better, eats better, is more relaxed. Must get it from his mom. Max loves Clark and thinks he's so cute and often wants to hug and kiss him and give him toys, but now that Clark has started crawling, Clark slimes Max's toys and Max is somehow surprised and distraught. "NO, Clark!" How could he? ... he's a baby, dude, and you left the slinky on the floor.

Like Max, we used our baby name generator algorithm web app thing, Bantling, to name Clark. Here we also used the Starbucks test to disqualify a name (if the barista gets the name wrong or asks you to repeat, the name is not obvious enough). There are no more boy names in existence that would satisfy both Chloe and me now, so we pretty much have to stop making children.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been four years since The Motivation Hacker came out, so here's another updated graph of ebook sales by platform including the second year. (See also Second Year Book Sales, First Year Book Sales, Aftermath: The Motivation Hacker)

I forgot about checking the numbers for year three, and now it's been just over four years, so I thought I'd take another look. Looks like sales have more or less held steady on Kindle and the other ebook platforms, but CreateSpace paperbacks have come out of nowhere, so year four was better than year three or even two. Cool! (CreateSpace paperbacks cost more than ebooks, $7.99 to $2.99, but I set it so that the royalty is the same either way, about $2.21.)

Ratings kept falling on Amazon, from 4.4 two years ago to now 4.1. Goodreads inched down from 3.85 to 3.81, with a combined total of 633 ratings. I wrote the book quickly (about 200 hours total) and have now made about $17K, or around $86/hr. Not a huge amount, but not bad for something that I initially thought only 50-100 people would read.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Max's vocabulary started exploding around 15-17 months old. I started writing down everything he could say (with understanding of what it means) starting at 18 months, when he could say 107 words. I stopped when he hit 1000 words, a day before his second birthday. During that time, he learned an average of five words a day. Here's the graph:

I did kinda want him to hit 1000, so I spent extra effort teaching him words in the last nine days.

Out of the 1000, he knew 248 Chinese words, 738 English words, and 14 words in other random languages. He learns most of his Chinese words from me, and some at daycare. I speak mostly Chinese to him, but it's not natural for me, so sometimes I switch back to English, plus Chloe speaks all English to him, which is why his English is way ahead.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I just got back from a business trip to China, where I visited Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. I listened to and spoke a lot of Chinese, and while I can't yet get by in a business negotiation without occasional-to-frequent interpretation, I think my interpreter wouldn't have survived if I hadn't been able to get most of what people were saying on my own. Plus, I made a very good impression whenever I dropped some Mandarin. I can be proud of how much I can still converse in Chinese now, almost ten years after I stopped taking Chinese classes. (Thanks Skritter for maintaining my vocabulary all this time!)

But the real demonstration of my language skills was when a guy came up to me to hand me a flyer for a Chinese kung fu club that was just opening up. "Chinese gongfu! Very interesting!", he said.

“对不起，我没有时间。” Sorry, I don't have time.

After this basic response with good pronunciation, the guy was excited by my apparent comprehension, and redoubled his efforts. After a bit of conversation, I decided to tell him I was flying out tonight and so couldn't possibly come see the fight:

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

You have probably heard of Soylent, the liquid meal replacement where you can conveniently get all your balanced nutrients by just drinking liquid Silicon Valley. I mean, you've already outsourced all your other chores to my fellow startups–don't you want to save another two hours per day and eliminate all superfluities?

No? Yes? Well, it's not for everyone, but I sure would like more time for my important stuff, and I've already eaten food tons of times. Plus, if I can have my default meal be a healthy one, I'll sacrifice extra tastiness (which is why I don't eat dessert). I'm in. Forget eating! Yet...

I like Soylent, but it takes a lot of trust in nutrition science to say, "Let's just combine a bunch of individual micronutrients that match the recommended daily allowances, since those are exactly what all humans need, right?" Never mind that some of the RDAs were established by a handful of weak studies–you still have to believe that not only did we get the nutrient levels right, but that those nutrients are all you need, and that they work in isolation, in the specific forms that are included in your Science Drink (which may not be bioavailable or bioequivalent).

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Baby Max is four months old today. I posted when he was one month, talking about what a difficult little demon he was, but after eight weeks he magically changed overnight into the sweetest baby ever! We were so surprised the first time he slept 7.5 hours straight instead of waking up every 3 hours, we kept waking up anyway just to go stare at him. "Maybe there's something wrong with him!" But he kept doing it, and now he sleeps from around 8pm to 4:30am every night, wakes up to feed, then goes back to sleep until around 7:30am. It is amazing. And where before he cried a lot, always seemed unhappy, and didn't even know how to smile, now he generally loves everything and will smile his head off if you just look at him.

Here are some more surprises from the first four months of Max.

1. He loves "reading" books.

I had thought that before he could read or understand words, or even be able to visually recognize cartoons of things, he would get bored when I read to him. But even from the beginning, books held his attention and excited him. Thanks for all the books, everyone (but especially Mom)!

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.